In around 1990, I had the good fortune to visit Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California. I was writing a story on it for People, but the article never ran, probably because there was no good news peg; a better writer might have been able to figure out how to create an angle despite that, but I was not a better writer.

Like Simon Rodia's Watts Towers an hour or so away, Bottle Village is a work of folk art/architecture. Tressa Prisbrey scrounged her raw materials at the local dump and just did it. She had no training but she had a vision, which is half the battle.

The object shown above (made out of Dr Pepper bottles and concrete) was from a building that was too far gone to repair. The see what the rest of the village looks like and to learn about how it's doing today, visit these sites:
http://home.roadrunner.com/~echomatic/bv/index.html
http://bottlevillagestuff.web.officelive.com/default.aspx